On Rest and seeing the world incorrectly

The pitfalls of poverty thinking

Another prompt piece for you all. I’m thinking about creating a separate Substack for the prompt pieces, but I’d love to get your input on such an idea first. Let me know if you’re happy getting them here, or whether you’d prefer a separate list!

Thanks for your input, and I hope you enjoy it!

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In order for me to embody a prompt regardless of which, I slow down. But this week I've stayed slow in my body, as my mind has raced ahead. Embodying the prompt ‘rest’, I am simply waiting, watching, writing, and doing what needs to be done right now, and not much beyond that.

You'd think this would be calm, peaceful, and relaxing but the biggest thing an extended period of rest shows you is how incessant the mind goes on about bullshit (almost all the time) and just how often it leads our body with it.

Exercise has decreased, but I've been taking long walks as a form of replacement therapy. Reading has been nonexistent, but I've written loads in my journal, substack or into other planning documents. Frequent human contact has slowed down, and my digital communities have been more than willing to pick up the slack.

It is a slower pace, but the essence is the same. The blocks that my mind is coming into contact with aren’t the rapid, easy to beat down ‘quick kills’ that I face in regular life.  They’re  bigger, they go deeper, and they're more complicated.

When you're bouncing forwards and backwards from all manner of input, you're incapable of finding rest. It's only when the mind can be rested and concentrated, in a body of the same state, that the stuff from long ago can be seen.

I grew up thinking my family was poor because other kids got more pocket money or had fancier things in me. Before I was 15, I started working in a pizza shop so that I would have some pocket money, but also that I could pay ‘rent’ (a very nominal fee, my parents weren’t slave drivers although I knew nobody under the same circumstances) at home. 

At the same age, one of my older brothers had three different jobs so that he could get what he wanted. This reinforced the idea.

I was totally wrong. We were as middle class as they come, and my parents were teaching me to have a good relationship with money. But you can't teach an 8 year old money mechanics when his best friend gets five times as much pocket money as him. You must be poor. 

By the time I was earning full-time wages, all my spending habits were on par with the income. I never went into debt, and I guess this is with full credit to my parents' approach during these developing years, but I never saved a penny either.

Money was a luxury to be enjoyed while it was there, not to be hoarded. To live like a tightarse was unacceptable.

The story continued in parallel to childhood in adult life. I went into the public sector, most of my friends went private, and soon enough they had more pocket money than me again. This idea that I was poor was planted and I just kept on living in it.

Then I decided to travel instead of keep on playing this game - ‘find myself’ as they say - and almost stopped drinking. Suddenly, the little savings that I had didn't seem so little. And I learned that I can live off the smell of an oily rag like the best of them. It's mental how far your cash can go when you don’t spend it all on booze, taxis,  and Hungry Jacks. That’s Burger King, for you non-Australians. (That’s right, we got the trademark first, what’s up!)

So that's what I did. I continued to live cheap and be savvy, but there was still a process of resistance at play here. I didn't want to have lots of money because the savvy saver had become part of me. ‘If I'm not poorer than everyone around me, who am I?’

All of this has been coming to light now in this period of rest, because I've also been taking a rest from poverty-conditioned imagination. You don't have to entertain imagination under the assumption of pre-existing circumstances, you can dream as big as you like. Sounds obvious, but conditioning is a motherfucker.

I’ve seen just how dearly I've cherished this ‘I'm more thrifty than you’ idea, while simultaneously holding this thrifty assumption as the lens through which I look when I enter imagination.

But the lens is broken now, and all I can see is how incredibly distorted the picture of the imagination has become. Rather than racing to repair the lens, I'm kicking my feet up and relaxing. The picture on the other side of the obscurity has got my full attention now, and I'm happy to let the poor, broken pieces of the past fall aside.

There is a term that gets thrown around a lot, ‘abundance mindset’, and of course I think it's a complete wank expression, but I'm finally unable to understand where it comes from. 

It isn't that we need to build an abundance mindset, rather we need to recognise the seriousness of the scarcity mindset (still a wank expression) that holds so many of us in its grip. I've written this with money as the object, but it can be in any form.

‘People didn't like me as a kid, so I can never be likeable.’

‘Learning in school was hard, so I can never be smart.’

‘Exercise was always for fit people, so I can never do exercise.’

See how deeply the conditioning of your upbringing goes, and create the circumstances necessary to go deeply into it. Wrap up your obligations, see to your commitments and take a break. 

Take rest, and see what comes up.

Because, contrary to the scarcity mindset, we do have time, all of us, and getting rid of these obscuring lenses is the single most important thing that each and everyone of us can do.